Could Droid Be The iPhone Killer?

I saw the new Verizon Motorola Droid commercial which launched last night. The commercial points out, using noticeably Apple-like fontage, that the new Droid will have all that is lacking in the iPhone such as a physical keyboard, a 5 megapixel camera with built in flash, a replaceable battery, multi-tasking and widgets, all without ever showing the iPhone.

All in all it is a pretty clever ad. Yes, The phone, named after our little robot buddy from Star Wars,  is licensed from Lucas Film  Apparently there is an actual ad campaign called Droid Does . The previous link takes you to a Droid teaser site that counts down presumably to the launch date of October 30 and lets you sign up for updates in  a cheeky fashion:

Verizon’s savvy marketing ploy had me for a minute, questioning whether or not this would truly be the demise of  the iPhone. I love my iPhone and altough I don’t need a “real” keyboard but I admit that I would love to multitask or be able to take better photos with it. But I thought, iPhones app base is much too big and strong to be taken over quite yet by even a phone with a 5 megapixel camera, multitasking, et cetera. The iPhone is such a ell-integrated little bugger that even r2D2’s little friend could not overtake it. What do you think?

Then another thought crosses my mind. There has been a lot of talk lately about the iPhone being opened up to other providers (such as Vodaphone) and  seeing such success in Europe. Could this sassy little ad be so significant as to be saying. “We don’t need your stinking iPhone at Verizon, we have a better phone of our own”? Hmmm….